Music Library

Music Library

On October 25, 1997, the Borusan Culture and Arts Center opened the first private Music Library in Turkey, thereby taking yet another important step in its mission to build a cultural bridge between Turkey's masses, particularly the burgeoning young people of the nation, and western classical, jazz and Turkish classical and folk music.

Sprawled over two floors of its headquarters building in Beyoğlu, Istanbul's cultural and intellectual hub, the Library features a wide range subjects, including contemporary classical music, opera, jazz, rock, rhythm and blues, ethnomusicology and the history of music. Its comprehensive collection dates back to the medieval and Renaissance periods and covers all the major historical eras of music right up to modern times.

The Library's first floor features special archives of works by well-known Turkish composers, the largest collection of its kind in Turkey. In addition, it houses an AV center, fully equipped with state-of-the-art high-tech equipment for listening to CDs and LPs and viewing videos and DVDs. The first floor also contains a research area, which students can reserve in advance. To aid in music exploration, these facilities include three PCs, each with high-speed Internet connection.

The second floor is reserved for printed materials, such as books, magazines and music scores. All of these are placed at the disposal of researchers and interested members of the public. In all, the Music Library's collection contains 7,000 books and 7,200 musical scores. The audiovisual department has 10,000 CDs, 3,000 LPs, 150 videos and 100 DVDs.

Borusan's Music Library is open to the public six days a week and, in order to facilitate research, issues memberships to students and faculty members from all the music conservatories in Istanbul.